Internship Narrative

What will happen when an international student from China work for the first time in

an institution of the US and work with people who come from almost everywhere in

the world? People might expect a lot of cultural conflicts or cultural differences in this

situation. As the observer and the participant in this case, I indeed witness various

expected or unexpected cultural differences. However, the similarities I shared both

with my American colleagues and the immigrant participants also remind me how

cultures resemble each other.

The Shared Communicative Repertoires

The immigrant students, my American colleagues, and me, the three parties, at first

seem quite different from each other in their identities and positions in the American

society. However, the three parties also share a lot of similarities in their

communicative repertoires.

For example: I am an international student, not technically an immigrant; I have been

in an academic environment for a while, and so too have my American colleagues.

Therefore, the repertoire I share with my colleagues would be based in our similar

experiences in educational settings, our student-centered beliefs, and our shared

commitment to creating a supportive and friendly environment for language learners.

On the other hand, like the immigrants who are new-comers to the US culture, I also

am new to this culture, and desire to learn a lot about it. My great interest in the

Civics Class demonstrates this. Therefore, when talking about the new and unknown

American culture, the immigrant students and I share curiosity in common, as well as

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the willingness to learn about foreign cultures.

The American staff and the immigrants also share repertoire which I call social

participants. In identifying a social participants repertoire, I do not mean that I am

not participating into the social activities, but rather that the social activities in which

my colleagues and immigrant students participate are sometimes not familiar to me

(for example, paying taxes, parking, child care, mortgage). Therefore, I could

temporarily be reminded a second time of my identity as a student and would learn

from both my American colleagues and immigrant students about the life outside the

academic repertoire.

In this narrative, I will draw on my own observations during my internship at the

Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians, from three different perspectives: I will

address my own experiences, those of the immigrants and refugees served by the

Welcoming Center, and the Centers US staff. The specific examples presented in this

internship narrative mainly deal with cross-cultural interactions and the learning of

English as a second language. Most of my observations are drawn from my daily

work experiences at the Center and are closely related to my responsibilities.

The Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians:

In the article Collaboration of Nonprofit Organization with Local Government for

Immigrant Language Acquisition, Wilson (2012) pointed out that Philadelphia is one

of the nine cities in the US providing language access services for immigrants.

Besides, according to my interview with one of the administration instructors, the

Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians is one of the sixteen federal funded, non-

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profit organization. Its non-profit feature pushes the profit-aimed stakeholders

backward for a bit and most of the services provided are free and start from the good

will of offering help to immigrants. Therefore, a friendly, agreeable and welcoming

environment is created to meet its non-profit identity. Two examples drawn from my

observations could illustrate well.

Among my American staff, there are several ways for addressing the immigrants in

WCNP. Immigrant clients, immigrant students and immigrant participants are

the main three options for using. Most of my American colleagues prefer using

immigrant participants because they perceive immigrants as collaborators. In this

collaborative process, the staff together with immigrants achieve the goals of settling

down in the US. For most ESL class teachers, they prefer using immigrant students

to refer to the immigrants. From my point of view, clients are rarely used could

show WCNP s non-profit feature. From this non-profit feature, I find the similarity in

the academic settings where I have been involved in for a lot of years. At the very

beginning of my internship, I found a great many shared repertoire, like understanding

of creating supportive and student-centered environment, with my American

colleagues due to my student identity.

Like immigrant participants who are new-comers to the US culture, I also new to this

culture and desire to learn a lot about it. My great interest in the Civic Class could be

a demonstration for this. Therefore, when talking about the new and unknown

American culture, immigrants and me always share the curious feelings, as well as the

willingness that desire to learn about foreign cultures. In addition, I am not only a

new-comer into a culture but also a new-comer into a new social setting. Working as a

volunteer at WCNP is different from being a student at school even though the two

settings share a lot of similar features.

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In the first week of my internship, I received the training of the in-take process from

my instructor. I sat with my instructor and memorized how she makes phone calls to

people who register for the WCNP to schedule appointments with them. Then the

immigrant participants would take their documents to the center and the in-take

instructor inputs all general personal information into the database of the Welcoming

Center. During the in-take I am supposed to communicate with immigrants by asking

them questions about their conditions of education, family, finance, living etc and

finally their ultimate goal coming to the center. The database is designed as the

archive of all the immigrants who register for the center so that they might get help

according to their conditions and their employment status would also be traced by

using the contact information recorded in this database after they leave the center.

I still remember how nervous I was when my in-take instructor checked with another

volunteer I worked with about my performance for my first independent in-take work.

As a new-comer to the office setting, I also had my in-take.

I. Observations about myself

My internship in the Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians provided me with an

opportunity to observe the operating of a non-profit organization, the living conditions

of immigrants in Philadelphia, and the office culture in the US. Before I worked as an

intern in this organization I did not have any other working experience in the US and

most of my interactions with people from non-Chinese culture happened within the

school and an academic environment. Therefore, the observations about myself

mainly deal with moments when I broke previous stereotypes towards the US culture

and moments when I obtained new perceptions of the US culture.

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Breaking the stereotype

I was lucky enough to participate staff meetings every Wednesday. The purpose of the

staff meetings was to put forward issues that currently emerge in the organization so

that the staff could come up with possible solutions to the issues. Or sometimes

visiting guests from other organizations would be invited to give lectures during the

staff meeting. One of the guest lectures which made a strong impression on me was a

lecture given by the founder of STAND UP PARTNERS. This organization provides

people with free advice on getting safe medical care and legal services in medical

related lawsuits. The speaker began his lecture with a series of appalling statistics

about medical accidents due to inappropriate treatment. My colleagues and I were all

shocked by the fact that in the US a large number of people die every year because of

the careless medical treatment. Especially for me, before I came to the US my

perception of the medical care system of America was that it is quite advanced, in

other words, large numbers of medical accidents are impossible in the US. However,

the fact is that in the US, the medical care system has its own issues and medical

accidents still exist.

This moment of breaking my previous imaginations or stereotype reminds me of the

article by Nenner (2009). The story reports a case in which a hospital carelessly dealt

with an immigrant from China whose nose kept on bleeding after he was assaulted in

the course of a robbery; he refused to be discharged from the hospital. In the article,

the writer looks in detail at the reasons for the Chinese immigrants refusal to be

discharged from the hospital. According to the testimony of the patient, the hospital

refused give him further treatments because they suspected him of being an

undocumented immigrant. In any case, he did not recover from the injuries. The guest

lecture revealed problems in the medical care system for average American citizens,

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and showed that the situation might be even worse for immigrants.

Many immigrants come to the US because they have to if they want to survive. A lot

of immigrants own countries are currently war-zones and the basic safety of people

could not be guaranteed in their own countries. For many such immigrants, the US

represents a place of hope, where they might be able to live in relative safety.

However, if immigrants could not get basic services like necessary medical treatments

in the US because of their immigrant identities, I wonder how immigrants could

survive?

Obtaining new knowledge and perceptions

The first thing I spent some time on to adjust myself was the ways of addressing my

colleagues. Because of the quite friendly and immigrant-oriented working

environment at the Center, everybody addressed each other by using the first name. I

struggled a little to get used to that because in Chinese culture and in the academic

context, I rarely address people who are elder than me by using their first names,

which at first seemed inappropriate from my perspective.

Another new awareness I got from my internship experiences was the importance of

checking the work schedule each day before starting work. I found that such

schedules are quite important in the US office culture at least in the Welcoming

Center. People were expected to check all the schedules or shared calendars before

taking actions. There was a time when I double-scheduled the office room due to my

lack of awareness of checking the calendar. Sticking to plans or schedules seems to

me is one key feature of the office culture in the US.

Besides those new notions about office culture, I also learned a lot from the Civics

Class. The Civics Class was meant to prepare immigrants for their Citizenship

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Application Test. Therefore, a lot of information about American history, politics, and

government is covered in the class. Working as a classroom assistant, I also learned

details of US history and politics (this, for example, was the first time I learned what a

phone bank was). In this class I gained many insights into life in the US, and

specifically about US politics, as it was an election year (2016). In addition, I also

learned about street skills, which might be rarely discussed in formal, academic

environments.

My experiences demonstrated to me that volunteering is a good way for any

newcomer to integrate and get insights into a new culture. This in fact is

recommended in Dudleys article Integrating Volunteering into the Adult Immigrant

Second Language Experience (Dudley 2007). The researchers used interviews and

audio and video recordings to document the experiences of volunteer work

undertaken by adult immigrant L2 learners in Canada. They investigated how

immigrants volunteering experiences contributed to their language development and

their social integration. The research results show that most of the immigrants have

different ways of using oral English to communicate and for most of the immigrants,

volunteering is regarded as a potential language learning strategy. Many of the

interviewees reported that they could practice both productive and receptive English

during interactions with native speakers. Other immigrants who engaged in volunteer

work in schools on tests which require proficiency in listening, speaking,

pronunciation, and questioning benefited from opportunities to practice their English.

Also, most of the interviewees reported that volunteering enabled them to have more

intensive contact with local people, which helped them integrate into the target

culture. These reports from the research were also proved by my own working

experiences in the Welcoming Center. I not only met people from all around the

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world, but also learned the American culture through daily encounters with my

American colleagues, and learned more about current issues, histories, and electoral

politics by assisting in the Civics classes.

In the Welcoming Center, immigrants definitely have a lot of opportunities to use their

English such as asking their case managers for help, chatting with their classmates

from other countries in English or visiting English-language websites to look for

information. Although I am not an immigrant, as an outsider of the American culture,

I believe if immigrants could also have the opportunities to work as I do, they would

gain a lot of insights of this culture as well.

II. Observations of the US staff

My primary responsibilities in the Welcoming Center were to serve as an ESL

classroom assistant and as an intake assistant; I also worked with the case manager

team.

This allowed me to become involved in most of the work the organization does, and

gave me the chance to observe my American colleagues who work in different

divisions. Because of the immigrant-oriented philosophy of the Welcoming Center,

my observations of the US staff are mainly about their efforts to communicate with

immigrants and create a warm, welcoming environment for them.

The first thing I noticed when I started doing intake was the box of tissues on the

office desk. My first thought was that this was for the staff use, but later I learned

from our case manager that the tissues were actually for immigrant clients. By and by,

I learned the necessity of the tissue when immigrant clients came to do the intake and

talked about the hardship and struggles in their previous life or the wars in their

mother countries. There were a lot of times people could not hold back tears.

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The staff in the Welcoming Center also help immigrants with their English learning

outside the ESL classroom. Sometimes when it was the break time, some staff would

chat with the immigrant students in English, partly in order to informally assess their

English speaking proficiency. There was a time when an immigrant mistakenly

pointed at the kitchen and said chicken instead. One of the case managers corrected

the student but then began to use chicken to refer to the kitchen area every time

when talking to the same immigrant student, and by and by nearly all the staff began

to adopt the funny mistake. When looking at these examples, I really appreciate how

the staff at the Welcoming Center make efforts to create a friendly environment for

the immigrants so that even when they made mistakes in using English, the

immigrants would not feel embarrassed and would not be discouraged from using

English to communicate with people.

ESL Classes

ESL classes are the main source of my observations. In the ESL 0-1 class, most of the

immigrant students were beginners, which meant that most of them might only

understand English alphabets or simple greetings or words. The content that the

teacher covered in this class ranged from basic grammar to daily-topic-related

conversations. In order to compensate for the lack of chances of speaking English

outside classes, the Welcoming Center also provide students with various levels of

conversation classes twice a week.

In the ESL 0-1 class, the teacher did not simply teach English grammar, but also

taught knowledge that is related to US culture. For example, once when the teacher

taught English words about colors, he pointed out for the students the two different

ways of spelling gray/grey.. The teacher told the students that grey is more

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common in British English and there are a lot of other English words that are spelled

in two different ways according to whether it is British English or American English.

Although this is just one tiny thing in the teaching, I think it already shows the

students variations in English usage, and puts these variations in a broad cultural

context.

Another example I observed illustrates that how the ESL class teacher is regarded as

the model or sample of the American culture by the immigrant students. The teacher I

worked with was originally from New York City, and I noticed that when he said the

phrase kind of to express uncertainty, he usually slightly stretched out his hand and

fingers and shook his hand a little bit. I do not know whether the gesture is specific to

New Yorkers or not, but I did notice that the immigrant students in the class,

especially some active Spanish speakers, gradually adopted this gesture, as did

another Arabic-speaking student later in the semester. Once, when she was asked to

express uncertainty and she forgot to say kind of, she just used the gesture to

express her meanings and the teacher quickly got her intentions and spoke out kind

of ? to reassure his guessing. I also noticed that in this class this body language was

even used to express meanings such as I have no idea in communications by

immigrant students.

From this example, I saw how a gesture used by a ESL teacher articulated among

immigrant students. I think it is because most of the students saw their teacher as a

model of the target culture to imitate, and the articulations of the body language even

gains new meanings when adopted by immigrant students from different cultures.

This phenomenon reminded me that Rymes in her book Communicating Beyond

Language (2014) put forward the Diversity Principle, which means The more widely

circulated a communicative element is, the more highly diverse the interactions with it

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will be (p.10). The ambiguity of the meanings of the gesture and the widely use in

this class could illustrate this principle.

III. Observations of immigrants

English Learning

The main goal of most of the immigrant students in the ESL classes was to improve

their English so that they might have more opportunities in the new society. Once, an

immigrant from South Korea asked me how she might improve her oral English. Her

question made me realize that as a matter of fact, a lot of immigrants do not have

chances to speak English outside the ESL classes. One reason is that many a

immigrants do not have current jobs and their relatives or friends who speak their

mother tongue are the only people they have interactions with. Another reason is that,

even though they do have jobs, they still do not have that many opportunities to use

English when their jobs do not require them to use English often. ESL teachers, from

my point of view, might make efforts to address this problem.

One approach I learned from one of my colleagues at the Welcoming Center is to ask

students to report in class about their conversations with others in English. The ESL

teacher often asked students to describe the situation of the conversations, with whom

they have conversations, how they feel about that, and what language problems they

encountered in conversations. This approach reminds me of another article I read.

Stewart (2010) proposed a new pedagogy for L2 writing class that involved asking

immigrant students to write about their own feelings and experiences after coming to

the US. My colleague used the same strategy, which helps to integrate immigrants

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daily experiences into their English leaning. Of course, ideally immigrants need to

practice their oral English in interactions with people in their jobs but this oral

reporting assignment, from my point of view, encourages immigrants to use English

outside the classes and to some extent, this assignment connects English pragmatic

use to immigrants daily life.

Interactions with each other

Interactions among immigrants were the main ways that they learned about each

others cultures. Although immigrants sometimes preferred talking to people who

spoke the same language, cross-cultural communication beyond languages also

happened a lot in the Welcoming Center.

There were moments in the ESL classroom when Spanish-speaking students and

French-speaking students talked to each other to compare their languages with

English. When they found similarities in the forms of certain words, they would

happily use limited English to express the feelings of belonging to similar cultures.

One activity that students in the ESL class particularly enjoyed was when the teacher

asked what the corresponding vocabulary for an English word was in other languages.

It seemed to me that immigrant students were all amused by the great differences in

languages as well as the similarities.

My observations about the students interactions during the break time show how

communication could go beyond the language barriers. With limited English

proficiency, immigrants use abundant body language and facial expressions to

communicate each other. As their English proficiency grew, these interactions became

more and more frequent, and it seemed to me that perfect understanding or speaking

every word exactly was not necessary for successful communication to take place. As

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long as both of the speakers knew the ongoing context and the purpose of the

conversation, the exchanges might be naturally understood. Sometimes,

communication took place with minimal use of language, as, for example, when a

shared YouTube video might automatically reveal the purpose of communication.

All these observations once again make me feel the importance of communicative

repertoire. Looking back on one of the chapters Communicating beyond language:

repertoire and metacommentary as method, Rymes (2014) puts forward the concepts

of candidate communicative elements and metacommentary. According to Rymes

(2014, p.117), a comunicative repertoire is the collection of ways an individual uses

language and other means of communication to function effectively in the multiple

communities in which they participate. Examples stated above could well illustrate

how gesture and body language served as one communicative repertoire help the

individuals communicate with each other. On one hand, these examples reminded me

that when it comes to language education, it is necessary for the educators to instruct

students to recognize the candidate repertoire elements and then explicitly explain

these elements within a the given context. On the other hand, as an individual, I

realized once again that how abundant are the communicative repertoires people from

different cultures use during daily interactions. And these daily encounters provided

me opportunities to expand my own communicative repertoire, which could expand

my scope of communication.

Interactions with me:

Besides observations drawn from my in-take work, my other observations about the

interactions of the immigrants with me are mainly from ESL classes.During my

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internship, I helped with covering the whole ESL classes twice due to the absence of

the instructors. Those experiences were my very first teaching and through the

interactions with my immigrant students, I for the first time realized how I perceive

myself as a language educator.

Generally speaking, my teaching did not encounter critical moments and everything

went well. However, when I reflect on my teaching, the most difficult thing I notice is

communicating with my students in the class. The students I taught are from ESL 0-1

class so I made special efforts to make myself understood when giving the

instructions. Because of the limited English level of the students, I had a hard time to

tell whether my students understand my instructions and the contents I taught. The

most direct way for me to know was asking explicitly Any questions? or Does that

make sense? As the class proceeded, I noticed that students got bored with

responding to these questions. I was worried at that time because I did not receive the

expected feedback from my students so I had no idea whether they were on the same

page with me. Also, the reasons for students reducing interest in responding could be

students were getting bored because the contents are too easy for them or students

were getting confused because the accumulating new information as the class

proceeded. I could not tell which reason it was when I was teaching. Only after I

finished my class and I was told by the students that the contents were rather easy that

I realized that boredom was one possible reason for their lack of active participation.

Now again when I reflect on my teaching, I think it might because the position I have

at that time is the teacher thus immigrant students even might be bored, they would

not explicitly tell me the contents are not proper. Also, during my teaching I had some

moments that I felt I am not qualified to teach because I am not a native speaker and

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students seem to not fully trust in my teaching as they trust in the class instructor. For

example, when students had doubts about my explaining, they would not rely me that

much like they did to the routine instructor. And they would resort to the Internet a lot

during the class.

In Chens (2014) article, the writer examines moments of her own negotiations as an

international faculty of color in an intercultural communication course at a university

where faculty of color are few. Using her own teaching as a case study, Chen critically

reflects on how her identity as a non-native speaker affects her teaching. This article

reinforces what I was experiencing when I taught in the Welcoming Center and it also

makes me rethink my identity as an ESL educator: what can I draw from my non-

native speaker identity in teaching? How could I get over my lack of confidence in

teaching due to my non-native identity? The teaching experiences in the Welcoming

Center definitely helped me to think about my identity as an ESL teacher in ways

which might not have occurred to me otherwise.

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 References

Chen, Y. (2014). Are You an Immigrant?: Identity-Based Critical Reflections of Teaching

Intercultural Communication. New Directions For Teaching And Learning. 138. pp. 5-

16

Dudley, L. (2007). Integrating Volunteering into the Adult Immigrant Second Language

Experience. The Canadian Modern Language Review. 63(4). 539-61

Holmes, P., (2015). The cultural staff around how to talk to people: immigrants intercultural

communication during a pre-employment work-placement . Language and

Intercultural Communication. 15(1). 109-24

Nenner, F. (2009). An immigrants story. Medical Humanities. 35. pp.118-9

Rymes, B. (2014). Communicating beyond language: repertoire and metacommentary as

method in Communicating beyond language: everyday encounter with diversity

(pp.116-23) New York, NY: Routledge

Rymes, B. (2014). Everyday encounters with diversity in Communicating beyond language:

everyday encounter with diversity (pp.101-15) New York, NY: Routledge

Wilson, C.E., (2012). Collaboration of Nonprofit Organization with Local Government for

Immigrant Language Acquisition. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. 42(5).

962-84

Stewart, M. A. (2010). Writing With Power, Sharing Their Immigrant Stories: Adult ESOL

Students Find Their Voices Through Writing. TESOL Journal. 1(2). pp.269-83

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